Hand-Tinted Photograph of Seated Woman

For this image, I started with a high-resolution scan of a black-and-white glamour photograph taken by a professional photographer. I then retinted the photograph by hand, choosing colors that simply looked good, without regard for reality (except for the skin, eye, and hair tones, which I verified as being close to the original). I retouched a few things, mostly to eliminate dust specks and defects in the original print or to change contrast. I saturated the tints after putting them in, and posterized the result. I ran some impressionistic filters over that, then put an irregular black border around the image. Finally, I superimposed a red image of the model’s signature onto the lower right-hand corner of the image and put a black halo behind it to help it stand out (it’s hard to read in this small version, I know, but that’s deliberate). I was looking for a colorful, pop-art sort of look. I don’t know if I succeeded.

Much of the attractiveness of this image is directly due to the quality of the original photograph and the prettiness of the model, of course.